OStatic

Slashdot passes on the news of Code_Swarm, a new project from Michael Ogawa, who has been working in the field of software visualization for a while now. The videos that it generates are pretty (here's the one for Apache 2), as we've noted, and they do serve to give you an idea of the pulse of activity in a particular project. You can pick out whether code or documentation commits prevail, as well as see major contributors rise and fall.

Version control systems seem to run in waves in the open source world. For many years, the venerable CVS had the lion's share of usage. Then along came Subversion, with the announced goal of being a compelling replacement for CVS. Subversion has gained enough popularity to be the baked-in choice in many tracking and management tools. Lately, though, I've been seeing more and more interest in git - the system used to track changes to the Linux kernel itself, among many other things.